Twitter Stock Falls Below IPO Price for the First Time

Investors who bought into Twitter’s public debut officially dipped underwater today. On Thursday, for the first time, shares of the embattled social media company dropped below $26—the pricing set during the company’s November 2013 initial public offering. The stock recovered slightly to close at exactly $26—a nearly six percent drop—leaving those first investors at break-even. (The stock peaked just after Christmas 2013 at more than $73.)

Google Finance

The decline in Twitter’s stock price began around three weeks ago following the release of the company’s second-quarter earnings. During a call with analysts, Twitter executives acknowledged that the challenge in attracting new users is that Twitter remains “too difficult to use.” Though the company boasts 316 million monthly active users, the platform has yet to extend beyond its niche user base of journalists, celebrities, and other “influencers” to truly reach the mass market.

Twitter’s board has also struggled in its search for a new CEO. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has taken over in the interim, but it’s uncertain whether even he is still in the running for permanent CEO. (Dorsey also serves as CEO of Square, the mobile payments company he co-founded in 2009.)

During the earnings call, Twitter’s chief financial officer, Anthony Noto, called for patience. But now it seems Wall Street’s patience has run out.

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Welp! Snapchat’s 420 Filter Celebrates Bob Marley With Blackface

Brian Barrett

Looking for a hip and also racially insensitive way to celebrate 420, the sacred marijuana holiday of people who somehow aren’t over it already? Snapchat’s here for you, with a new Bob Marley filter that gives you both dreadlocks and digital blackface. Hoo boy. It’s bad. It’s very bad.

There’s not much more to say, other than maybe to point out that in addition to the inappropriate and very tone-deaf racial mapping it also reduces Marley’s legacy to a pot joke. But we already got that, right? Even a teenager could! Which makes it even more of a wonder that Snapchat didn’t.

We’ve reached out to Snapchat to see uhhh… what exactly happened here. We’ll update if the company gets back, and/or when their representatives inevitably pull the filter and apologize.

Update: A Snapchat spokesperson provided the following statement:

“The lens we launched today was created in partnership with the Bob Marley Estate, and gives people a new way to share their appreciation for Bob Marley and his music. Millions of Snapchatters have enjoyed Bob Marley’s music, and we respect his life and achievements.”

The Way We Live Now: White House Prods Republicans on Twitter With @SCOTUSNom

This morning, President Obama announced his pick to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court: the chief appeals court judge for the District of Columbia Merrick Garland. Republicans in Congress have said they would refuse to consider any nominee, arguing that the next administration ought to be able to choose the next justice.

Ahead of the announcement, The White House laid claim to a new front in its battle with Republicans over the Supreme Court: Twitter.

In advance of the President’s announcement today, the administration launched a @SCOTUSNom Twitter handle, which it will use to disseminate information in 140 characters or fewer about Garland and provide context about past Supreme Court elections. Early this morning, before Garland had been confirmed as the nominee, the account was cued up with factoids like this:

The account, it seems, is a way of convincing Republicans—or at least the general public, who may then coerce Republicans—that electing a new Supreme Court justice under President Obama is not only critical, but has historical precedent. The administration took a similar approach when it launched its @TheIranDeal handle in hopes of helping the agreement go down easier among Americans. It’s all part of the White House’s plan to “meet people where they are,” and that means, wherever they are online.

Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceutical, is brought out of 26 Federal Plaza by law enforcement officials after being arrested for securities fraud on December 17, 2015 in New York City. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The Twitter masses are rarely, if ever, in agreement. Which is what makes today so momentous, for today is the day that Martin Shkreli, who may be the most hated man of 2015, was arrested. For this one day, the people of the Internet put aside their differences and celebrated.

Far be it for us to delight in another person’s misfortune, but when that person is Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical CEO who gained infamy for jacking up the price of a life-saving drug called Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per tablet, we’re allowed a righteous snicker or two.

According to Bloomberg, Shkreli was arrested early this morning on suspicion of securities fraud, a charge that’s completely unrelated to the price-gouging scandal. The 32-year-old allegedly paid off debts from his time as a hedge fund manager with stock he obtained illegally from his company, Retrophin, which he founded prior to starting his most recent company, Turing Pharmaceuticals.

Shkreli has, himself, been active on Twitter since the price gouging scandal broke open, even trolling presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who have both spoken out against Shkreli on the campaign trail.

Now that he’s been arrested, the pharmaceutical CEO is, well, getting a taste of his own medicine.

Shkreli may be a pretty universally reviled person, but we have to say, we’re kind of grateful for his rise and fall. After a year of incessant in-fighting on Twitter, a detestable ripoff artist has, somehow, brought us all together. A holiday miracle, indeed.

Your Twitter Feed Is About to Be Flooded With Polls

Twitter

Twitter has decided to make one if its experimental features available to all. Over the next few days, users will begin to see the option to add a poll to their tweets, letting them quantify their social media spats like never before. Polls remain live for 24 hours, and all votes will remain secret.

The company made the feature official in a tweet, though curiously forewent the opportunity to poll its followers as to whether they would use the new polls or not. That may not ultimately matter, though; poll creation seem destined to help drive brand engagement more than individual accounts. “For poll creators, it’s a new way to engage with Twitter’s massive audience and understand exactly what people think,” writes Twitter project manager Todd Sherman in an accompanying blog post announcement this morning. “For those participating, it’s a very easy way to make your voice heard.” The audience Sherman refers to, of course, is only as massive as your follower count, give or take a few retweets, meaning Justin Bieber should be able to work a poll far more effectively than a Twitter civilian.

Further limiting the potential audience, for now at least, is that Twitter polls only appear in the official Twitter app or on the desktop. Users of Tweetdeck, or third-party Twitter apps, will simply see the question posed, without the option to tap their preferred response.

Polls joins other recent Twitter initiatives like Moments, which lets users follow specific events through a curated collection of tweets, and removing the character limit on Direct Messages, give it an entrenchment in the messaging wars. If Jack Dorsey’s first few months as interim-cum-permanent CEO are any indication, Twitter’s going to see plenty more experimentation to come.

Instagram Now Tops 400 Million Users And 40 Billion Photos

Instagram is killing it, and it wants you to know so. The social network just said it now has 400 million people posting carefully plated food and pristine landscapes to its service every month.

The milestone announced in a blog post on Instagram’s site shows a five-year-old social network that continues to luxuriate in reliably steady growth. What’s more, the Facebook-owned company said more than 75 percent of those Instagrammers live outside the US; among its last 100 million members to join, more than half live in Europe and Asia. Instagram highlighted David Beckham from the UK, Indonesia’s Raffi and Nagita, German soccer player Toni Kroos and South Korea’s T.O.P. as some of the more noteworthy new non-US members.

The company also reports more than 80 million Instagrams, which altogether enjoy 3.5 billion daily likes. In total, more than 40 billion photos have been shared on its site.

1 Billion People Used Facebook on Monday

A million users visiting the same Internet service on the same day. This isn’t all that cool. You know what’s cool? A billion users on the same service on the same day.

And now it’s been done. So says Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg says one billion—yes, ONE BILLION—users signed onto Facebook on Monday. While the company claims around 1.5 billion monthly users of its service, this is the first time that many of them have clocked in on the same day:

We just passed an important milestone. For the first time ever, one billion people used Facebook in a single day.On…

Facebook Wants to Crack Down on Pirated Videos

Facebook says it will give video creators and publishers a way to remove copyrighted videos that have been uploaded to its popular social network without the proper permission.

The company has come under fire from video creators, like YouTube star Hank Green, for allowing users to embed and post videos on the site, even if the content doesn’t belong to them. But this may soon change.

Facebook responded to such concerns in a blog post today, saying that it will soon be testing a “new video matching technology,” allowing video partners to check whether their content has been uploaded without their consent.

“This technology is tailored to our platform, and will allow these creators to identify matches of their videos on Facebook across Pages, profiles, groups, and geographies,” the company explained in the post. “Our matching tool will evaluate millions of video uploads quickly and accurately, and when matches are surfaced, publishers will be able to report them to us for removal.”

During its testing period, the service will be available to several media companies, multi-channel networks, and individual video creators, Facebook says. But it plans to make the tech available to more partners in the future.

The tech sounds a whole lot like what YouTube uses to keep copyright owners happy. Developed in 2007, YouTube’s system, called Content ID, allows creators to discover when any audio or video content they own is uploaded without their consent. When that happens, users can then choose to have it removed, monitored, or monetized by ads placed by YouTube.

In its post, Facebook does not mention any plans for monetization of its videos. But a matching system like Content ID seems like an obvious, and necessary, first step. Video, after all, has become an increasingly important part of Facebook’s News Feed. Earlier this year, the company said that it serves up four billion views a day.

But to keep video creators happy, and willingly uploading their best content, the company will need to reassure them that it won’t be stolen. And as the battle between Facebook and YouTube heats up over those very creators, and the much-desired video ad dollars they bring along, this will likely only be the first step in creating a more conducive environment for video creators, and advertisers, alike.

Related Galleries

Are you a “haha,” “hehe,” or “lol” person? Typically I’m an “lol” girl who mashes her keyboard with “HAHAHAHhahajakakjahaahkajkjjsdhfkajdsfk” to convey real, body-quaking laughter. If you thought your preference for online laughter was meaningless, think again. According to a post from the Facebook research team, “e-laughing is evolving” and the social network has been analyzing the data we use in its platform since the end of May. (Definitely hit the link for the deep dive; it’s a fascinating study.)

To likely no one’s surprise, the most common expression of e-laughing is “haha” followed by emoji. Facebook goes deeper yet into the nuances of who uses what sort of online laugh:

Age, gender and geographic location play a role in laughter type and length: young people and women prefer emoji, whereas men prefer longer hehes. People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji, while Seattle and San Francisco prefer hahas.

Most people stick with one type of e-laugh, while about 20 percent will switch between two. And while “haha” and “hehe” or even “hahaha” and “hahahahahahaha” and “hahahahhhhahahahaha” (a misspelled, elongated “haha” that most of us might interpret as “this is so funny I don’t care that these letters are in the wrong order”) might seem like they belong in the same category, there are subtle inferences to make about them each.

The six letter hahaha is also very common, and in general, the hahaers use longer laughter. The hahaers are also slightly more open than the hehe-ers to using odd number of letters, and we do see the occasional hahaas and hhhhaaahhhaas. The lol almost always stands by itself, though some rare specimens of lolz and loll were found. A single emoji is used 50% of the time, and it’s quite rare to see people use more than 5 identical consecutive emoji. Perhaps emoji offer a concise way to convey various forms of laughter?

If you’re a visual learner, thankfully Facebook broke out all the graphs and charts to illustrate how we laugh online.

Snapchat Highlights #WestBankLive Today

Today, you can watch life in the West Bank unfolding live on Snapchat in the app’s Live Story feature. After the social-media app highlighted sea-side Israeli city Tel Aviv in a Live Story earlier in the week, Palestinians and others on social media petitioned Snapchat to also do a live-stream of life on the other side of the checkpoints.

The guy in the tweet above has been dancing from Ramallah all morning, much to my delight. I just returned from a short trip to Jerusalem and my biggest regret was that I was not able to visit the West Bank while I was there—the closest I got was reading beautiful Palestinian poetry in a bookshop in East Jerusalem. After learning about #WestBankLive on Twitter this morning, I signed up for Snapchat (I know, I’m late!) just to get a glimpse of life in a part of the world we in the US hear so much about but rarely see inside. The feed looping right now shows everything from the Bethlehem check point with Israel to delicious traditional foods and clothing to the four lions at the center of Ramallah’s main square. It will update throughout the day.

After today, like all Snapchats, the West Bank feed will self destruct.

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